In Rip It Up and Start Again, Simon Reynolds offers a deep account —
the first — of the chiefly British 1978-84 fallout of punk's rise and
collapse. Beginning with the Sex
Pistols' early 1978 breakup and the subsequent formation of Public Image
Limited by the Pistols' lead singer John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten), Reynolds
narrates a series of roughly concurrent musical histories that together paint a
lucid, if detached, history of the postpunk era and the genres it birthed.

Reynolds's unambiguous love of
postpunk stems from his belief in (and in turn fuels his argument for) the
period's “amount of great music created, the spirit of adventure and idealism
that infused it, and the way that the music seemed inextricably connected to
the political and social turbulence of its era.” (xi) Despite pop historians' frequent positioning of punk as a
quintessential response to the English depression that ultimately gave rise to
Thatcher's administration, Reynolds insists that “the long ‘aftermath’ of punk
running from 1978-84 was way more
musically interesting than what happened in 1976 and 1977, when punk staged its
back-to-basics rock ‘n’ roll revival.
Even in terms of its broader cultural influence, it is arguable that
punk had its most provocative repercussions long after its supposed demise.”
(xii)

Because punk's brief flame scarcely
had time to spread beyond the geography of London and the demographic of the
lower-middle classes before arguably fizzling (and selling) out, by the time
the notion that any kid could change the world with music reached the northern
cities, the suburbs, and the universities, punk's piss-and-spit politics of anti-everything
(exemplified by the Sex Pistols' chant of “No future”) had worn thin, leaving a
fast and desperate-sounding musical aesthetic in search of a new message to
carry and a new community to nurture it.
Or perhaps punk gave out in 1978 expressly because it had attracted these new fans and musicians who did in
fact see a future and who, idiosyncratically to their socioeconomic and
educational background, infused the genre with a forward-looking modernism that
its teddy-boy roots lacked. Though
it is of course naïve to suppose that punk itself was without sophistication,
the reality that its savviest progenitors — most obviously John Lydon and
Malcolm McLaren — were also vital in developing postpunk’s stylistic and
political subtleties suggests that punk’s dissolution into futurism was a
growth into a more resilient and fertile, albeit less gloriously iconic,
music. Whether this dissolution
came from within punk or from its new Bourgeois practitioners is neither
especially clear in Reynolds’s book nor in history itself, but either way, the
historical uniqueness of postpunk’s sense of exploration and richness of ideas
is central to Reynolds’s feting of the era, and rightly deserves greater
recognition in today’s scholarly understanding of western pop music history.

The meat of Reynolds’s book — his
actual history of postpunk bands, labels, and producers in their heyday — is
factually exhaustive, spinning threads that comprise nearly every significant
musical and conceptual postpunk subnarrative. The book’s mini-biographies of Public Image Limited, The Pop
Group, Gang of Four, Joy Division, Scritti Politti, and countless others
suggest implicit connections between postpunk musicians by way of their astute
grasp of leftist critical theory, enthusiasm for dub reggae and its high-tech
production techniques, and a fascination with (though no allegiance to) Nazi
imagery. But because the book
offers so many individual historical trajectories rather than a wide-scoped
single chronological narrative (which admittedly would be dizzyingly
unfocused), it occasionally leaves one yearning for a broader view. While Reynolds paints a convincing
backdrop against which postpunk developed, the connections between artists, between
recordings, and especially among fans and in musical communities are often
barely visible from one chapter to the next.

This is, however, a minor oversight
when one considers that with few exceptions, most of the music in this book has
simply never been discussed (or even acknowledged) at all in serious musical
writing. The greatest contribution
of Rip It Up and Start Again is the
same to rock fans and musicologists alike: it whets the musical appetite,
insuring its subjects both a new audience and deserved scholarly
significance. Though Reynolds is a
journalist by trade (and perhaps too seldom cites sources), the groundwork is
laid here for serious academic inquiries into punk’s demise, class and
futurism, industrial and Goth music’s glorification of pain, and the
mid-eighties shift from ironic overidentification with capitalism to
straight-faced musical yuppiedom.
These are topics about which scholarship has always lagged far behind
journalism anyway.

Those few whose knowledge of
postpunk is on par with Reynolds’s may note his perspectives on Gang of Four,
The Residents, and The Human League are particularly fresh, positioning the
bands within Marxist theoretical frameworks while never showing off with
intellectual name-dropping. While
he modestly — maybe over-reverently — holds back when writing about such
traditionally untouchable (and thoroughly documented) acts as Joy Division and
Throbbing Gristle, and more or less overlooks The Sound, The Cure, The Comsat
Angels, and The Durutti Column, for Reynolds to have expanded the book further
in its schema would risk confusing it for an encyclopedia. That said, nitpickers will absolutely
prefer the UK edition of the book, which contains photographs and an extra
three chapters; sadly, the companion CD is only available separately on V2
Records. Even in the unwisely
shortened US edition, however, the ease with which Reynolds sculpts such a
wealth of information on the era into a narrative is only rivaled by Jon
Savage’s England’s Dreaming, and
unlike the curmudgeonly Savage, Reynolds embraces the continuing legacy of his
chosen music, cautiously celebrating the recent postpunk revival in popular
music that lies at the heart of Interpol’s, The Killers’, and Bloc Party’s
success. In his last and arguably
most interesting chapter, Reynolds zooms out and fluidly traces postpunk’s
descendents, deftly connecting grunge, acid house, ska, and industrial music up
to the present. Though narrating
an era explicitly outside of his book’s scope, Reynolds’s enticing brevity in
this epilogue only underscores how exciting the future research sparked by his
work might be.

Rip It Up and Start Again is an unpretentious book about
smart music, and Simon Reynolds nearly always wisely lets the music’s
intelligence speak for itself.
Seldom has any pop been so critically self-aware as postpunk, and if
audiences are willing to read between the lines in this book, they can see
musically, culturally, and historically an untold story indispensable in
understanding popular music of the last twenty-five years.